What we think

By way of a blog, we’d like to introduce to you a new Talik Strategic Partner: Mark Leonard. Mark’s into bringing together social process, somatic awareness and the cognitive principles of mindfulness meditation to organisational culture. We’re excited to have him on board Find out more about him and his background here Check out Mark’s fascinating take on the role mindfulness could ...

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How is sustainability framed in organisations? How do alternative framings enable or inhibit action on sustainability challenges? It seems the research we carried out five years ago at Ashridge is as relevant, if not more so, today. The questions we pose still fresh. Of the 24 organisations we spoke to, from Unilever and M&S, to Natural England and Sainsbury, the majority are ...

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Three quarters of an hour into a coaching session today, my “coachee” – in the midst of some deep, appreciative, soul-searching – suddenly lifted his head and laughed, “I thought this was supposed to be Presentation coaching!” You’re right. I responded. It is. I think clients are often surprised at the way I ask them to think, or to question themselves. What does their new hobby or their favourite subject at school have to do with “being a better presenter”? It’s ...

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It’s remarkable how often you’ll hear people say “We need to communicate better” or “It’s a communication issue” as if saying that alone will fix the multitudinous ills that plague them. Of course it’s a communication issue, the sad truth is, it’s ALWAYS a communication issue. Somehow, somewhere, someone isn’t communicating clearly and the butterfly effect amplifies that tiny wingbeat into the full-scale hurricane descending on some hapless soul elsewhere! Ok, I’m ...

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WEF thinks business is having a ‘morality moment’. They come around every so often, generally triggered by the public pronouncement of some less than savoury action by a multi-national company. The ensuing ...

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With the value of Bitcoin riding high (or maybe not by the time you read this) I figure I might ponder upon cryptocurrencies: those digital currencies such as Bitcoin that operate independently of a central bank, putting them beyond restriction and confiscation. Rather than get in to the techie stuff, though, I figure to ponder upon cryptocurrency in a wider context. Indeed, "pondering in a wider context” is something I spend much of my professional life helping clients do, especially ...

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Welcome to what we’ve learned to expect to be “the most wonderful time of the year”. From what I can tell from myself, clients, colleagues, family and friends, however, wonderful is more of an aspiration than a reality. The reality is more like a frenzied attempt to ‘get everything done’, much of which involves the acquisition of more ‘stuff’. Surely it could be more wonderful than that…. I’m minded of how one of my coaching clients recently reviewed our work ...

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Last week I was back at the Telegraph Studios for another in an irregular series of interviews for their Business Reporter magazine - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/business-reporter/. Among the topics this time was the release of the IPhone X and the ever-growing scale and problem of e-waste. As we head towards Black Friday – a frenzy of consumerism appropriated from the US, characterised by flash sales – it’s hard not to feel pretty depressed. It’s a bit early in the season ...

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October found me performing a new musical about the life, conviction and death of Dr Alan Turing (code-breaker, defeater of the Enigma machine, castigated homosexual and controversial suicide). In preparation for my role as Turing’s barrister I undertook (as, indeed, I do with every role) a great deal of extensive research (thank you the internet!) And whilst this was going on, I was also making my steady way (as, indeed I do with every book!) through What Do You Say After You Say Hello by ...

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I was working recently at a business school with a group of experienced executive coaches looking at the relational aspects of organizational life. One of the many Chief Execs who attend the programme, asked rather irritably “How do you justify spending time and resources on this to shareholders?” It feels to me like trying to convince people that breathing is important to sustain life. How do you imagine things get done in an organization full of people? Do people always simply do ...

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